


Picture Perfect

by squirrelsruntheworld



Category: South Park
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-29 14:24:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8493319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirrelsruntheworld/pseuds/squirrelsruntheworld
Summary: Nobody notices it, but Kenny McCormick likes to draw.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Slowly moving old fic work from ff.net and getting back into South Park. I have a soft spot for Kenny.

Nobody notices it, but Kenny McCormick likes to draw.

His passion for drawing started when he was only eight years old. Every day during art hour, the class was free to do whatever they pleased as long as it involved construction paper, pencils, glue and a creative mind. ‘But not one on drugs, mmkay' as Mr. Mackey would say.

It was the only time the kids would actually be quiet and concentrate on something that didn't involve insulting each other or the teacher and no one had put more focus into their work than Kenny. When each of the boys had finished their masterpiece, they would share it between themselves before turning them in. Stan had done a stick figure delineation of his family artfully decorated with puffy white cotton balls to represent snow. The mountains in the background popped out well above the shoddily done portrait. Kyle had drawn himself playing basketball on the courts with his stature towering over every other player. Cartman had splashed his page with celebrities as stars and money symbols bordered his drawing.

When Kenny showed his, they stared at him practically cross-eyed. He had drawn piles upon piles of rats devouring a poor, helpless victim. The mouths of the critters splashed across the paper in red glitter so that it sparkled and jumped out from the page. The boys scrunched their noses and raised their eyebrows in moderate shock.

"That's sick, dude," Kyle said.

They all nodded in agreement.

"Seriously, Kenny. You have poor people issues," Cartman scoffed.

Kenny sighed beneath his hood and decided not to show his drawings to anyone, anymore. Nobody would understand.

Since Kenny's family was obnoxiously poor they couldn't really afford to buy a sketchbook for him. His father decided that keeping a TV without cable or even local channels to flip through was more important than paper since it hardly retained any entertainment value. The static on the television screen was better than blank pages.

With pencils he had borrowed and stolen from random people at school, he drew on whatever he could find - lost receipts left in the streets, the back of flyers that had carelessly been stapled to poles or taped on windows and napkins sturdy enough not to tear under his pencil point.

He doesn't know when he started using drawing as an outlet, but after doing art projects in school his damp, cracked, and dirty room walls became plastered with various works of his that he had decided to keep. Above his tattered mattress he had pinned his serial killing clowns and doodles of carcass eating rats in a splotched, uneven order.

They covered the dirt on the walls that the posters of bikini-clad woman could not.

To defuse the boredom that playing Laundromat owners had brought on during one particularly long school break, the boys decided to play Junior Detectives. It added a sense of mystery and appeal to the basement as they covered the washing machine with cardboard and dragged the unused filing cabinets from the dusty corners. Since Kyle, Cartman and Stan had deemed themselves lead detectives, Kenny was defaulted to be the sketch-artist.

Though, he never actually sketched what he was told.

When Cartman's mother appeared at their "agency" with a little girl sporting red-haired pigtails, each boy crowded around her as she asked for their help to find her lost doll. The boys immediately placed her at Kenny's desk and prompted her to describe the characteristics of said lost doll to the blonde.

He pulled out a sketchpad and pencil Kyle had lent him for the purpose of maintaining a sense of realism to their game of make-believe. Fixating a look of utmost concern and concentration on his face as the little girl gave bland descriptions, his hand quickly scrawled across the empty slate.

"You got it, Ken?" Stan asked after Kenny had finally lifted his pencil from the page.

Kenny nodded.

"All right, let's see," Kyle insisted.

Kenny turned the paper towards them with a wide smile hidden beneath his orange hood. The picture was of a woman with huge olive-shaped boobs.

Kyle's nose wrinkled like a raisin as soon as he glanced at the offending sketch.

"Damnit, Kenny, that's not what she said!"

"Put that away, dude!" Stan remarked, exasperated.

Without wasting another moment on their friend's picture-esque pranks, the boys turned away as Cartman addressed the young girl in the yellow dress whose name turned out to be Sarah Peterson. Blue eyes rolled in their sockets as he ignored them and he shuffled over to the wall labeled 'Kenny's Most Wanted.' Covered already with sketches of naked women; their chests ranging in size from saggy, cucumber shaped boobs to round and voluminous watermelons, he pinned the newest portrait to the mixture.

He stood back and admired his doodles of girls with their bare forms gracing the corkboard. His friends just hadn't come to appreciate the female form yet, but he had.

Kenny had always been, and probably will almost always be, the most perverted of them all.

He took the notebook home with him after they forgot about playing junior detective and began playing laundromat owners again. He drew in it at least once every day and hid it beneath his bed each night. When the pages became full of women and death and his pencil was nothing more than a wooden nub with the eraser practically gone, he wished for a real sketchbook - with real drawing pencils that had their own range of soft to hardness graded levels of graphite and white erasers. The hard, rubber pink erasers at the end of his number two pencil often left dejectory rose-colored marks on the pages of his works. But all he could do was wish because he didn't have the money to spend on paper luxuries.

One night as he listens to the stray dogs howl outside and his parents arguing in the next room over, he focuses on the opposite side of a bright, yellow flyer he tore from the cafeteria's board. Face down; it advertises boiled peas and chicken pasta for lunch. His mother's constant shout of wondering out loud why his father couldn't get a job and his father's drunken reply, which is almost always slurred, intermittently disrupts his thinking. Glass shatters against walls, and his mother's screams are high-pitched.

Every other night it's the same tired fight, the same petty arguments. Every night in between is a calm before the storm of the next hurricane of broken bottles and bruised egos. Kenny likes the nights when they could be civil and loving and enjoy the mind-numbing static of the TV with his brother, Kevin. They would try to find pictures in the pixels and they would make up their own elaborate stories of drug addicts and princesses or dragons and parachuting policemen and then he could pleasantly enjoy his time rather than concentrate most of his peace of mind on ignoring his parents.

On this particular night his door swung open and his father swaggered in, drunk with cheap, sugar whiskey and stained with piss.

"Goddammit, Kenny, why is your mother such a goddamned nag?" he asks; his walking is unstable and his eyes almost cross.

His left eye sports a ring of purple and blues and blacks are beginning to form beneath it. His wife had probably sucker-punched him from being so angry.

"Why doesn't she go out and get a job if it bothers her so damn much, huh? Tell me that, Kenny."

Kenny refuses to answer as Stuart gulps down another shot of alcohol. His father staggers closer to his bed and peers down at the flyer and stubbed pencil in Kenny's hands.

"What you doing, Kenny?" he questions, his head lolling back and forth. His eyes suddenly catch a glimpse of the papers stuck to the walls.

"What is this?" he remarks, snatching the one of the glittered rats off of its tack.

Kenny's blue eyes stare at his father's movements, watching as drool slides down the side of his mouth and onto the paper.

Dark, bleary orbs squint in vain as if they cannot process what the lines form clearly enough; as if Kenny drew a Picasso or splashed a Pollack upon the mesh of color processed tree mulch.

"You some kind of psychotic boy?"

His father then crumples up the page in his hands and carelessly tosses it over his shoulder as he leaves. He turns and waves his bottle of alcohol in the air as a warning.

"I h-(hic)-ope not. You know we can't afford therapy."

Stuart shuts the door and leaves Kenny in a blanket of interrupted peace. The boy, still clad in his grimy orange parka, slowly slides off of his bed and picks up his crumpled piece of art.

As he carefully folds it open, pieces of red glitter fall to the floor like tears of blood. Kenny sighs, his hand pushing back his hood as he uses his short, dirty nails to scratch an irritated spot beneath his bangs.

Tossing the damaged piece of art next to his current project that sits on his bed, he rolls back onto the mattress and stares up at the ceiling, currently giving up on the piece that he had been working on.

On the paper next to his elbow is a soft, elaborate sketch of his family. Their lead-drawn mouths are smiling and they appear happy and clean as they stand in front of their two story house which is gently drawn in the background. His charcoal sun is shining and there are no signs of broken bodies or blood or bikini's and to him - it is, to date, the best thing he has ever done.

Kenny draws death and fear because it's what he knows best.

He draws sex and women because it's what he loves most.

He draws everything perfect because his own life isn't.


End file.
